Drawing on the evidence of a growing body of corpus research over the past two decades, this article investigates the phenomenon of spoken grammar in conversational English and the extent to which our current knowledge of the area is reflected in contemporary textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The article reports on a survey conducted by the authors of 24 general EFL textbooks published in the United Kingdom since the year 2000 and concludes, on the basis of the survey, that coverage of features of spoken grammar is at best patchy. Where it is dealt with at all, there tends to be an emphasis on lexicogrammatical features, and common syntactic structures peculiar to conversation are either ignored or confined to advanced levels as interesting extras. We argue that this is inadequate for many learners, particularly those for whom the development of oral fluency in informal interactions with native speakers is an important goal. (Contains 3 tables and 3 footnotes.)